4 Tools To Aid In The Hunt For Restaurant Staff

Staffing in the restaurant industry is a hot topic these days. Take Julia Moskin's

NYTimes Article published earlier this week, which outlined the shortage of line cooks in today’s restaurant kitchens. It’s true. Servers, line cooks, hosts, bartenders and dishwashers come and go with incredible frequency which complicates your job as a restaurant owner. There is never enough hours in a day to find, hire and train new staff to offset employee attrition. To make that task a little less daunting, we’ve compiled a short-list of some of the places you can go in your hunt for talent here.

Whether You Are Painting a Broad Brush

If you have time to sift through the most well-known job sites - Monster, Indeed, CareerBuilder, and Glassdoor - this can provide a great first pass at sourcing talent. If you are running a time deficit, however, you can cast a wide net in a relatively small amount of time and at a low cost by relying on Craigslist. Fair warning - its strength is also its weakness. Because job postings are seen by such a large audience, hiring restaurants run the risk of unqualified applicants applying for open positions. While it may make it easier on the front-end to yield numerous resumes, it creates a bottleneck on the back-end. Anticipate sifting through a lot of noise to find even a few suitable candidates.

… Or Looking for a Way to Narrow the Funnel

On the other end of the spectrum, there are sites like Good Food Jobs which curate job requisitions for locally-focused & sustainably-minded businesses. These postings tend to attract high-caliber applicants. The downside to a site like Good Food Jobs is that it is rarely the first job site a potential hire will go to while searching for work. The people applying via Good Food Jobs are top-notch, but the number of applicants per posting is much lower than what someone’s going to find by posting on Craigslist.

Prefer to Stick to the Tried and True

Then there is the tried-and-true method of finding new restaurant hires: word-of-mouth. It is fairly common in the industry to “put feelers out there” to help out your fellow industry friends. This works well if your industry friends are relatively good judges of character, understand your business culture, and are well-versed in your business needs. Said another way, the net of possible hires is only as wide as the your network.

… Or Want to Try Unconventional Means of Scouting Talent

Let’s not forget the power of social media. Posting job openings on your restaurants’ Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts will certainly be the most cost-effective way to get the word out about your restaurant’s hiring needs. Momofuku in D.C., for example, recently announced its intent to hire via its Instagram account. This is predicated on the assumption that your restaurant has a strong social media presence. Few followers means few applicants means you are back to square one.

We admit. The current state of the restaurant staffing market is for the birds. Hopefully, we've at least brought your attention to a set of preliminary tools available to you which can match your approach to recruiting. However, that doesn’t mean it will be a cake walk. Thank heavens you can rest assured that your ordering process has been made simple through BlueCart! Phew!

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Published on

October 23, 2015

Ryan Karolak works in sales and marketing for BlueCart and is a recent graduate of NYU's Stern School of Business. Ryan's hobbies include record collecting, sports and nature. Ryan lives in Brooklyn, NY.